Читать онлайн «The Thieves’ Guild»

Jeff Crook

The Thieves’ Guild

Chapter One

27th day of Darkember, 34SC

The citizens of the grandest of all Krynn’s cities, Palanthas, City of Seven Circles, hurried along her lamp-hung streets, glancing worriedly above their heads as they rushed homeward from the markets and plazas, another day of bustling commerce at an end. Thoughts of supper and bed competed with worries about the weather and the prospects of arriving home soaked to the bone, for an ugly snarl of clouds hung over the city’s rooftops, mumbling with thunder and crackling with lightning. Such violent, early-winter storms had become an all-too-common occurrence in the first years since the Chaos War, but this particular storm seemed to promise fresh surprises of fury and destruction.

The light glowing from the city’s many thousands of lamps and lighted windows painted the lower tatters of the storm a leprous yellow-gray, while directly above the center of the city, almost touched by the spires of the Lord’s Palace, a great swirling wall of cloud had lowered threateningly from the base of the huge storm. An eerie, warm, moist wind rose from all circles of the city and began tumbling litter, dust, and sand down her centrally radiating, emptying streets. Into this rising wind stepped a lone figure, swathed in a heavy cloak despite the unseasonable warmth of the evening.

Though his back was bent and his face slanted away from the biting dust-laden breeze, he walked with something of a sailorly swagger, like a man more used to the rolling deck of a ship than the cobbles of a city street. In his right hand, he swung a gnarled black cane, marking time with it on the cobbles with a light tap at each step. As he strode across the street called Temple Row, passing before its gates into the Old City, he tugged his deep hood close over his brow.

A pair of dark-armored Knights of Takhisis huddled in the lee of a guardhouse beside the gate, gazing expectantly at the sky. With a start, they noticed his appearance, but as he simply crossed the street and entered the notoriously loathsome Smith’s Alley, they let him pass without question. Instead, one rapped on the wall of the guardhouse, bringing a third Knight to the doorway.

The three exchanged a few words. The third guard scratched something with a quill onto a slip of paper, and nodded.

The cloaked figure ignored them. As he entered the alley, the wind lessened somewhat. The buildings here, some of them almost as ancient the city itself, crowded close upon the narrow alleyway, shutting out all light and air. The center of the alley was worn into a deep track by two thousand years of weary treading, and down it trickled a slow noisome sump of sewage, rotting rinds of vegetables, grease, and offal. The resultant odor was stirred, albeit with some difficulty, by the rising wind, but not enough to rake the air clean of its offensive smell. No mere storm, no matter how furious, could cleanse this particular backwash of humanity. Only the sea rising in flood might hope to purge these cobbles of their ages of filth.